Painting Fakes

Being something of a heretic myself, in a modest sort of way, I was interested to read Alister McGrath's Heresy.   McGrath is currently a theology professor at Kings College, London and has a glittering academic carreer, representing the educated face of moderate orthodox Christianity in the UK and beyond.  I've enjoyed a couple of his previous books - The Twilight of Atheism   provides a handy, accessible summary of the trajectory of atheist ideas in modern Western thought, while The Dawkins Delusion provides a pithy response to Richard Dawkins The God Delusion . Here he's moved on from atheism, which challenges the church from without, to heresy, which provides a challenge from within.  He is at pains to stress that heretics ancient and modern are not outsiders attacking the church, they are insiders trying to reform it, generally with the best of intentions.  So what is it that distinguishes heresy from orthodoxy?  There is a thread of thinking in 2...

So, the talks between Government and Opposition on reviving offshore processing have collapsed .  Even though both government and opposition want basically the same thing, each wants their own version of it and neither will compromise.  This is undoubtedly good news  for asylum seekers, at least in the short term, because Australia's current laws as interpreted by the High Court are more compassionate than either of our main parties would like them to be. Meanwhile, Tony Abbot has plumbed new depths of absurdity in this increasingly absurd debate, suggesting that a Coalition Government would return boats to Indonesia .   As usual, Abbot is a little short on practicality here.  First of all, there is the issue of detecting the boats.  The ocean is wide, the boats are small.  Often the first Australian authorities know of their existence is when they chug into the dock on Christmas Island. Secondly, there is the issue of the process of th...

Finkelstein and Silberman  suggest that the book of Genesis began life as a series of orally transmitted stories which were turned into literary form relatively late in the piece.  It is possible that the first eleven chapters, in particular, consist of orginally unconnected material, with the genealogies serving as a literary device to tie them together. If this is true, then it is possible to see that there is not one but four stories of the Fall in Genesis.  There is the one we usually associate with it, found in Genesis 2 and 3 .  Then there are the stories of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4), the Great Flood (Genesis 6-8) and the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11).  All four stories feature the same core elements - humans fail to live up to God's standard, God intervenes to punish them or prevent them from doing more harm, and there is a form of redemption at the end.  I'll talk about Cain and Abel and Babel later, but first the Flo...

Oxford mathematics professor and Christian apologist John C Lennox has recently acheived a high profile in Australia due to an appearance on the ABC's Q&A .  He has also debated noted atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer .  All of which means that sooner or later I was bound to check him out. God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? is Lennox's summary of his arguments against the "scientific atheism" of the likes of Dawkins and Shermer.  Its central question is whether the evidence of science has really killed off the idea of God.  His main antagonist in this debate seems to be Dawkins, and a number of chapters in this book are direct refutations of claims made by Dawkins - that the process of natural selection is sufficient to explain the origin of life, that an interventionist god violates the laws of nature, that David Hume's arguments are a conclusive philosophical refutation of the possibility of miracles. ...

Speaking of the Fall , my relaxing holiday reading this Saturnalia , has been AJ Mackinnon's lovely travel story The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow .  Mackinnon tells the story of his journey through the waterways of Europe, from Wales to the Black Sea, in a 10 ft sailing dinghy.  It's glorious fun, with the odd hair-raising incident to keep the adrenaline going.  Like to try crossing the English Channel in a dinghy?  Without any larger craft accompanying?  Like to be accosted by pirates in remote Bulgaria?  Like to be stuck in Serbia as NATO is about to begin bombing? Apart from the comedy and high farce, one of his most persistent themes is the kindness of strangers.  Just when he is about to despair, his boat is ready to fall to pieces, he is starving and out of cash in a Visa-less country, or some other disaster strikes, some complete stranger steps up with carpentry tools and expertise, good home cooked food, a towrope, a place of shelter,...

Prompted by reading an essay by Wendell Berry, I've been thinking about the second and third chapters of Genesis and what they have to say about our current environmental predicament. Many scholars think these two chapters represent the earliest Hebrew version of the creation account, with the opening chapter added at a later date.  They record the creation of humanity, and the fall of the first humans from their state of innocence. We are accustomed to think of ourselves as somewhat separate from nature, as shown in the diagram below. We understand that we are, to some extent, natural beings.  We know we need to eat and drink, that we get sick.  However, we see ourselves as fundamentally different from the rest of creation.  Hence, we see "nature" as something to be conserved, managed or exploited by us.  This is why we are able to talk so easily about balancing environmental and economic factors, for instance, as if the economy was something seper...

Happy New Year everyone.  I trust 2012 is a better year than 2011 or, if 2011 was the best year of your life so far, that at least the comedown is unspectacular. In between eating, sleeping and watching cricket I've been reading The Bible Unearthed, an earlier book by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, authors of David and Solomon .   This book operates on a broader canvas, providing an overview of the latest (at least up to their time of writing in 2001) archaeological evidence about the times in which the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, are set. Finkelstein and Silbermann are serious and distinguished historians and archaeologists, not eccentric amateurs like Tony Bushby or Stephan Huller .  They carefully cite and sift their sources, build their arguments from evidence and are careful to avoid overclaiming.  Nonetheless it is important to remember that archaeological evidence is intrinsically partial.  In a country which has been continu...